JENGHIZ KHAN by C.C.Walker . Squadron Leader, Royal Canadian Air Force, with Seven Maps in Colour (paperback edition) reprint from 1939

This book is an attempt to clarify one of the great periods of history, rather than to describe a man, because in spite of the fact that the man Temuchin, who won the title of Jenghiz Khan, was responsible for a human cataclysm with tremendous consequences to the future course of history, it must be admitted that the man himself remains a nebulous figure in the shadows. We have no portrate of him drawn by a contemporary artist, we know nothing of his stature or his bearing. Although his order loosed the whirlwind, it is not known whether he muttered the instruction to some subordinate, or whethet he stood erect as a soldier shoud and thundered his command to the waiting troops. The same is true of all the other great figures of this period who cut their names so deeply on the face of Asia. Chepe Noyon and Subutai Bahadur have left behind them nothing by which we can portray them, there are only their dreadful deeds for record that they existed at all.

All the great personalities of the Mongol galaxy have the same nebulousness. Of individuality, except in their application of the art of war, there is hardly a trace. Therefore anyone who attempts to write of this period finds himself at a great disadvantage, because he is limited to describibg the events and not the men who caused them. It is for instance a fact that Jenghiz Khan himself was fifty years of age when he commenced his first great campaign, and for the next sixteen years, until the day of his death, was a commander-in-chief almost constantly in the field. Yet remarkable as this point is, there is hardly a reference to his age in the authorities I have consulted, and for an Asiatic fifty is old age. It is true that Chang Chun's narrative has come down to us, and that he actually spoke to the old Khan on many occasions, but as a true Chinese, Chang Chun is more concerned with his own philosophy than with a description of the greatest figure in Asia.